🔗 Share this article

I hope you had a enjoyable summer: mine was not. The very day we were scheduled to travel for leisure, I was sitting in A&E with my husband, anticipating him to have prompt but common surgery, which resulted in our travel plans had to be cancelled.

From this episode I realized a truth significant, all over again, about how hard it is for me to feel bad when things go wrong. I’m not talking about major catastrophes, but the more routine, gently heartbreaking disappointments that – if we don't actually feel them – will really weigh us down.

When we were meant to be on holiday but were not, I kept sensing an urge towards looking for silver linings: “I can {book a replacement trip|schedule another vacation|arrange a different getaway”; “At least we have {travel insurance|coverage for trips|protection for journeys”; “This’ll give me {something to write about|material for an article|content for a story”. But I remained low, just a bit depressed. And then I would confront the reality that this holiday really was gone: my husband’s surgery involved frequent agonising dressing changes, and there is a finite opportunity for an relaxing trip on the Belgian coast. So, no getaway. Just disappointment and frustration, suffering and attention.

I know worse things can happen, it's merely a vacation, such a fortunate concern to have – I know because I used that reasoning too. But what I needed was to be honest with myself. In those instances when I was able to cease resisting the disappointment and we addressed it instead, it felt like we were going through something together. Instead of experiencing sadness and trying to put on a brave face, I’ve allowed myself all sorts of difficult sentiments, including but not limited to anger and frustration and aversion and wrath, which at least seemed authentic. At times, it even became possible to value our days at home together.

This recalled of a hope I sometimes notice in my therapy clients, and that I have also experienced in myself as a client in therapy: that therapy could perhaps reverse our unwanted experiences, like pressing a reset button. But that button only goes in reverse. Facing the reality that this is not possible and accepting the grief and rage for things not happening how we anticipated, rather than a dishonest kind of “reframing”, can facilitate a change of current: from avoidance and sadness, to progress and potential. Over time – and, of course, it requires patience – this can be transformative.

We view depression as feeling bad – but to my mind it’s a kind of numbing of all emotions, a repressing of rage and grief and disappointment and joy and energy, and all the rest. The substitute for depression is not happiness, but experiencing all emotions, a kind of truthful emotional spontaneity and release.

I have repeatedly found myself trapped in this desire to click “undo”, but my little one is helping me to grow out of it. As a new mother, I was at times overwhelmed by the incredible needs of my newborn. Not only the nursing – sometimes for a lengthy period at a time, and then again soon after after that – and not only the changing, and then the repeating the process before you’ve even finished the swap you were handling. These routine valuable duties among so many others – functionality combined with nurturing – are a reassurance and a tremendous privilege. Though they’re also, at moments, persistent and tiring. What surprised me the most – aside from the exhaustion – were the feelings requirements.

I had assumed my most primary duty as a mother was to satisfy my child's demands. But I soon realized that it was unfeasible to fulfill each of my baby’s needs at the time she required it. Her craving could seem insatiable; my nourishment could not come fast enough, or it flowed excessively. And then we needed to change her – but she disliked being changed, and wept as if she were falling into a dark vortex of doom. And while sometimes she seemed soothed by the hugs we gave her, at other times it felt as if she were lost to us, that no solution we provided could assist.

I soon discovered that my most key responsibility as a mother was first to persevere, and then to support her in managing the overwhelming feelings caused by the impossibility of my shielding her from all unease. As she developed her capacity to take in and digest milk, she also had to cultivate a skill to digest her emotions and her suffering when the milk didn’t come, or when she was suffering, or any other hard and bewildering experience – and I had to grow through her (and my) annoyance, fury, despondency, aversion, letdown, craving. My job was not to guarantee smooth experiences, but to support in creating understanding to her sentimental path of things not working out ideally.

This was the difference, for her, between being with someone who was attempting to provide her only good feelings, and instead being assisted in developing a capacity to acknowledge all sentiments. It was the difference, for me, between wanting to feel wonderful about performing flawlessly as a perfect mother, and instead cultivating the skill to tolerate my own shortcomings in order to do a adequately performed – and comprehend my daughter’s discontent and rage with me. The contrast between my seeking to prevent her crying, and understanding when she had to sob.

Now that we have grown through this together, I feel not as strongly the desire to click erase and alter our history into one where everything goes well. I find hope in my sense of a ability evolving internally to understand that this is not possible, and to understand that, when I’m focused on striving to rebook a holiday, what I truly require is to cry.